In Ille-et-Vilaine, staff members from the Department of Culture of the Ille-et-Vilaine departmental authority commissioned an artwork in order to bring their different units together and make the missions, values and realities of their day-to-day work more visible.
The Department of Culture of Ille-et-Vilaine comprises three units: Cultural Action, the Departmental Media Library, and the Archives and Heritage Department. It brings together 86 staff members with a wide range of responsibilities, some of which remain little known or not very visible.
This commission reflects the desire of a group of staff to unite these three units through a shared project and to affirm common values. Through this initiative, the commissioners wished to open a collective reflection with all staff members on how to make the Department of Culture more visible and easier to understand.
On the advice of the mediators, the commission was entrusted to Guillaume Pinard. Staff welcomed the artist into their units to explain the nature of their work and show him the spaces that make up their working environment. At the end of this immersion, Guillaume Pinard produced nearly 300 drawings that move freely between irony and kindness, the futile and the serious—humorous proposals for play and debate within the different units. The artist selected 163 drawings from the 300 produced. Sous réserve took on a prolific range of forms—editions, posters, books and notepads—which staff members appropriate freely and which spread organically within the Department of Culture, as well as to other departments of the Departmental Council.
